Adventures in Clutter Combat, and Other Stuff

March 17, 2019

I think it’s been about 10 years since I started this blog. Most of its visitors seem to be people who search the web for a particular topic, and come to one of my pages. People who had followed it in the past may have concluded that my clutter problem was something I solved, and I lived happily ever after. Not quite. You can fix a car that’s been heavily damaged, but that doesn’t mean you never have to give it regular maintenance again. Likewise, an uncluttered home will inevitably need to be looked at again when things reach a point of getting out of control again.

I’ve reached a point where things have gotten pretty out of control again. But it was from that first major clean-up I took up and used this blog to document, that I learned so much about myself, my old habits, and decluttering. And that’s been helping me take on this new round. So lately I’ve been taking before & after photos along the way. You may see many new “Why the hell do I still have this?!?” photos in the upcoming weeks.

In the meantime, I have an anecdote I’d like to post here. It doesn’t have to do with clutter, but it does have to do with the 30th anniversary of an event that recently passed. Here it is.

March 16, 1989 was one of those eventful days I have a good memory of. I remember four events in particular:

1) It happened to me my friend Danny’s birthday. Though by that time he was in a different school, so I didn’t see him on this day.

2) My homeroom teacher, who was a complete cunt, was actually out that day. That was rare. My wife had ended up having the same teacher some years after I had, and would probably use the same words to describe her.

3) I got into a fight after gym class. I started it. Though I think it would be more accurate to say I finished it. The boy who truly started it had started it with me 2 years before that, when he started to make relentlessly picking on me as a hobby. Did I win the fight? Rumor had it that I did. But in reality the fight was broken up by a teacher before it was finished. But the boy never bothered me again after that day.

4) I saw Metallica that night. It was my first time seeing them, and to this date the only time. Queensryche opened. What a show. I visualized a lot of vengeance and death to that boy from memory #3 as “Creeping Death” played. I managed to talk my mother into letting me stay home from school the next day on account of having been up late. Of course another part of that was not wanting to immediately go back to school the next day after memory #3. My brother, who was at the same concert, ended up going to school that day, much to his dismay.

Those were the big events on that day 30 years ago. I can still remember many little details about #3 and #4 too, for better or worse. It’s one of the curses of having a good long-term memory.

October 23, 2018

This is a blog post where I babble a lot about sheet music, and eventually show the details of my attempt at making a semi professional-looking copy of the transcription to Alice Cooper's song "Pain" (1980). Skip or skim as you like.

I still like the album version of this song the most, but he's also performed it in the move Roadie (see below), had an official music video, and even played it at some of his 2017 shows.

About My Sheet Music Hunting

In recent years I've been collecting a lot of sheet music. The reason for this has been two-fold. The less obvious reason is that sheet music can be very aesthetically pleasing to me, whether it's the artwork or just the phenomenon of seeing sound laid out in this visual way that humans have invented. The more obvious reason of course is the practical one: I like learning and playing songs as a musician, and sometimes getting an officially transcribed source is the way to go. Earlier this year I researched, uncovered, learned, and performed a long lost 19th century song in honor of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein:

Granted, you can search on-line and sometimes find "free" transcriptions of chord charts or guitar tablature for many songs. But you may not find one for the song your want. And even when you find it, the transcription can be pretty poorly done or just plain wrong.

The Library of Congress website has been a fun source of music that's old enough to be in the public domain, which means their copyrights have expired. I've found many fun songs from the era of World War One that I've learned and performed. And there are music stores, of course. But anyway, let's get to the topic in the headline here.

Amassing the other Alice Cooper Songbooks

In recent years I set out to obtain the various 1970s song books from Alice Cooper. Years ago my father gave me a pristine copy he had saved of a sheet music book of various artists who played the ABC "In Concert" series in the 1970s, including Alice Cooper along with other acts like Billy Preston. Some years later I stumbled across a copy of the sheet music to Alice's Lace and Whiskey album in a store. So what else was there?

Sickthings, an AC fan site, has a compiled list which was really handy. So using that guide and starting from the beginning:

"Alice Cooper Complete". Well it wasn't really complete, but it sure had a lot of stuff from the original Alice Cooper band. I found this on eBay, sold together with a set of other 1970s rock songbooks. There are two versions under this title, but I bought the one with more songs. Still absolutely nothing from the first two albums, and nothing but the title track from the beloved School's Out album, but a lot of songs none the less. But for the rest of the 1970s, there was a songbook for each entire album. Beginning with...

"Welcome To My Nightmare". This was my absolute favorite album in high school, and is still one of my "desert island" albums. I was happy to get this in the same lot as the "Alice Cooper Complete".

"Alice Cooper Goes to Hell". This took me a while to hunt down on eBay and Amazon stores until I got lucky. And it wasn't cheap. But so worth it.

"Lace and Whiskey". As mentioned, I lucked out and found this in a store earlier.

"From the Inside". Purchased earlier this month, thanks to eBay. This was another one that I found no listings for, but after checking and checking I finally got it.

Unfortunately, there's not much beyond that. You can find some "best of" books for guitar with songs taken from these albums, one more song book (1989's Trash album), and a few individual song sheets not included in any of the above, but not a lot else.

Cleaning up Pain

In my search for more Alice sheet music, I decided to look at the album that came out after From the Inside, which was the 1980 album Flush the Fashion. I had never heard of this album until I stumbled across the vinyl in a store one day in the early 1990s. I bought it, transferred it to cassette tape for easy walkman listening, and years later bought the CD import.

Apparently there was sheet music printed for the big single from this album, "Clones (We're All)". Doing some more searching though, I found an old, expired auction for a hand-written copy of his 1980 song "Pain":

Here's what I noticed about this:

The "handwriting" at first looked like some sort of digital font, not real writing. But comparing some of the letters, I've since concluded that no, somebody wrote this. And very neatly, too.

I don't think this was hand written by anybody special. My best guess is somebody just transcribed the song and was trying to make money by passing it off as an artifact. But who knows. Maybe it really was used in the studio. I have no idea.

All three pages of the song were scanned like this and available on the site! Not the best resolution, but certainly readable. (PRO TIP: Don't do this with items you're trying to sell. It gives the goods away. :) )

Unfortunately, as you can see, there was a lot of bleed-through from the other side of the page. I guess either the paper was really thin, or the ink was think, or a shitty photocopier or scanner was used.

And here's what I did to make my own cleaned-up copy. First, the music itself:

I didn't like that styling of the song title at the top. So with all of that space available, I looked though my fonts to find a fun, obnoxiously 1980s-looking font to replace it with.

The biggest challenge of course was removing that bleed over from the back pages. I had to use a combination of contrast settings, brightness settings, level/threshold stuff, making a separate masked layer of just the music, redrawing some of the staff lines to correct for the lightening, and so on. But I managed to get something I was pleased with.

The original scans had pages 2 and 3 together in the same image, so I had to do some cropping to separate those. They needed some different cleaning up anyway.

Also, I wanted to have a front cover for the music:

Originally, I tried looking for a font that was close to the one shown on the album title. Eventually though I gave up and just got a scan of the album cover, grabbed the original letters, and cleaned them up.

Taking the scratched word "FASHION" from the front cover, I took the "F" along with the "A", "I", and "N", squashed them together, used some cloning (Ha! Self-reference!) to alter the "F" into a "P". and voila: "PAIN".

The album came with two photos of Alice, from the same photo session. One was on the back cover, one was inside the record sleeve. I used the latter. I cleaned up the photo a little too, giving it a slight sepia tint.

You can see the cover at the top of this blog post.

Finally, I wanted to put it all together into a nice PDF. Most individual songs you see printed are a single large sheet folded into a booklet to make four "pages": a cover on the front, two pages of sheet music inside, and finally the third page of the music printed on the back cover.

A wonderful free site I've used for this sort of thing before is https://png2pdf.com. So that's what I did. It was just a matter of uploading the PNG images, and pressing a button to create a single PDF out of them. Go here for the result: http://oddmanin.net/ac-sheet.pdf (normally I would hyperlink that to make it easy, but my blog provider and my domain host are not working well right now; the blog changes the http to https but that doesn't work!)

August 01, 2017

On August 3rd, 1987, I walked into my local Strawberries record store. I walked over to the "D" artist section of the cassette tapes. There I saw a male clerk putting copies of a brand new cassette tape into the vertical shelves. I realized the album he was putting in was the same new album I precisely walked into the store for. So I asked him for a copy. That album was Def Leppard's "Hysteria". (And for anybody who still thinks "album" necessarily means "vinyl", you're wrong. "Album" is the general term for an official music release, no matter which medium it takes.)

I really have to put the personal importance of this album into perspective. Def Leppard was the first band I could really call a favorite. On my 8th birthday I got "Pyromania" on vinyl from my best friend Robbie, and on cassette from somebody else. I ended up joining the fan club. I bought t-shirts and posters. I sought out and bought their first two albums. I was obsessed.

But tragedy struck in 1984 when it was announced drummer Rick Allen lost his arm in a car accident. It took four long years for the band to recover and rebuild itself. The status quo lost interest in Def Leppard. But as a fan, I kept my loyalty. I stayed in the fan club, reading the news updates over those 4 years. I certainly got into many other bands over those years, particularly other heavy metal banda of the day, but Def Leppard was never forgotten.

I ended up losing that tape to an irresponsible friend named Craig, a.k.a. "Blinky" due to the way he'd firmly blink his eyes, who borrowed it and never gave it back. He insisted the case had shattered. Even though I had given him back his tape of "Diary of a Madman" I had borrowed. What an ignorant jackoff.

But by the summer of 1988, the album went huge, and "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was arguably the biggest hit of that season. My father did business with somebody who worked for the local 108FM station, and that station sometimes traded tickets with the local rock station WBCN. So after pulling some strings he managed to get 2 tickets to see them in concert.

It remains one of my most memorable concert experiences. Great laser show. Joe Elliot donned a Sex Pistols shirt. A lady tried to storm the stage when Steve Clark was soloing. Another lady charged the stage when Phil Collen was soloing. Yet another woman stormed the stage and made out with Rick Savage as he played the keyboard. A muscular guy in front of me showed his friend the sugar cube he was holding, motioning how he's chuck it to the stage (as others would do that day eith sugar packets). It was a way to request their big hit. Our seats were in the center, about 20 rows back. And on the way to the venue, my father bought me a replacement copy of "Hysteria". I bought the book "Animal Instinct" that day. My baby boomer father strangely ended up loving Europe, the opening band.

Fast forward to August 3rd *1997*. I went back to the same store to buy "Hysteria" on CD. I told the clerk the story. He was indifferent. What an alternative-loving asshole. The store eventually closed and changed into a flower shop anyway.

Like the die-hard fans of certain other genres of music, metal fans sometimes get into the delusion that they "own" their favorite bands. Then when a band they love gets immensely popular, they feel cheated. "Hey! We can't have all of these NORMAL people listening to that band! That's MY band! Our fan club is exclusive, and our own! Damnit, my favorite band sold out!" Lots of people took that attitude with Def Leppard's "Hysteria", but I never have. I even worked a couple of tracks into my solo act. It will always be a memorable album for me of great songs, and the time when my favorite band made a huge comeback when the world still was against them.

May 07, 2017

One of the biggest magnets for clutter, at least for me, is the open space around my desktop computer. Recently I had to clear this out because my ISP was giving me a new modem. In cleaning the area, I stumbled across a couple of Vanilla Visa cards. I had two more I was keeping in my wallet.

For those who aren't familiar with the Vanilla Visa card, it's essentially a prepaid credit card. A lot of drug stores and supermarkets sell them. Some companies will give them out as gifts too. You purchase the card for a flat fee and load it with a set amount of money, either paying for it with cash or from another credit card. Then you can use it just like a credit card. There are no additional fees; you already paid that up-front when you bought the card. Some versions of the card are re-loadable, and some aren't. I was using these for a while to help keep myself in budget, namely by loading a Vanilla Visa card with a set budgeted amount from my credit card, and then using only that loaded card to make purchases for the month.

One problem with these cards is that you can end up collecting a stack of them with low balances. You may have one card with a balance of $1.29, another with a balance of $4.90, and a third with $11.50. Unfortunately, you can't transfer all of those little balances together to one card. So if you want to buy something that's $15, you're out of luck. In theory, you could use the $11.50 first, then pay the remainder with one of the other cards, but most places won't let you split payments like that.

I searched on-line for some solutions. Some suggested using them at the gas station. It seems like a bit of a hassle to the clerk though to say you want to pay for 21 cents on pump #3, then come back and say you want to add 59 cents using this other card, and so on. Besides, I think that like many places, some gas stations have a minimal amount that can be charged for a card.

Here's one solution that worked for me: transferring the amounts to Amazon!

Some pages suggested buying separate Amazon gift certificates for each of the separate cards you have, and them redeeming them. But I found that you can just add them directly to your current Amazon gift card balance. Here's how I did:

Find out the exact balance on each of your card(s).

I found out that there's a slight difference between the "Vanilla Gift" and "One Vanilla" cards. In any case, if you look at the teeny-tiny print on the back of the card, you should see a website you can go to. Usually it's "VanillaVisa.com". You might be redirected to a different site from there.

In any case, you'll be able to enter in the card's number, expiration date, and CVV (three-digit code found on the back) to check the balance.

If it's not accepting the info, double check that you have cookies enabled for the site you're on, that it matches the type of card you had (I found that my "OneVanilla" card uses a different site than my "Vanilla Gift" card) and of course that you've entered everything correctly.

Log in to Amazon.com with your Amazon account.

I'm talking about the desktop website here, not the mobile app nor the mobile version of the website. I'm sure you could accomplish it on those too, but I'm writing the directions here for what I'm seeing on the desktop site.

Click "Gift Cards & Registry" and "Reload your balance"

In the "Amount" box, type in the exact amount you found for one of the cards.

In the list of credit cards, click "Add a card". Enter in the info for you Vanilla card.

You're required to enter a name. I just used my own name and didn't have a problem. I don't know if the name is actually checked anyway for gift cards.

You should now be able to follow the other buttons to transfer the amount on the card to your Amazon.com gift card balance.

Repeat this with any other Vanilla cards.

There's one catch to all of this: Amazon won't take any amounts that are less than 50 cents. I checked the balances of my four cards. I had $0, $1.35, $6.21, and $0.21. The $0 card was useless, so that was simple enough to disregard. The $1.46 and $6.21 cards were transferred. This left one card with 21 cents. The old me would have rationalized, "Let me hold on to this. Maybe I can find some way to transfer this too." But I decided to just throw it away rather than have the burden of trying to find a way to spend 21 cents.

February 10, 2017

Here's something I had posted to my Facebook page at the end of January when the news broke.

JOHN WETTON 1949-2017

There have been plenty of famous musician deaths in this past year following Lemmy, but this one really hurts.

I knew it was coming. I followed along on all of those updates from Twitter on elsewhere of Wetton's chemo treatments. I tried being hopeful. But I'd see those photos of him with his belt tightened to its tightest setting around his waist, and the photos where he looked less and less human. He fought a long battle. And I got the news mere hours after talking about him with a co-worker.

I had always known about Asia, but I don't think the Asia bug really bit me until the early 2000s. Sometime around then I was also introduced to Wetton's work with King Crimson. Being both a singer and a bass player myself, Wetton became a new source of inspiration. It wasn't long before Asia became one of my favorite bands.

The original line-up reunited sometime around 2006, and I made the effort to see them every time they came to town. I got a chance to meet John only once, at a VIP meet-n-greet in Connecticut. I made a point in telling him how incredible the (then) new album was.

In my solo act at the coffee house, I perform a number of Asia songs. I never went for the obvious "Heat of the Moment", though. "Face On The Bridge" was the first one I ever did. I've also done others I loved: "The Smile Has Left Your Eyes", "Don't Cry", "Judas", "Extraordinary Life", "Finger on the Trigger".

Well, my set list for my show tonight is pretty clear.

----

After writing this, with some time in the morning free before work, I banged out a few of these songs in the living room:

January 19, 2017

When I got to middle school, I had to pick a foreign language class. While most students were taking Spanish or French, I wanted to do something different, so I chose German. I ended up taking German in middle school, high school, and college. It's come in handy professionally for me too, with a few companies I've worked for.

One strange thing I learned about the German language is that it has quite a number of nouns for which there's no equivalent in English. The German word Schadenfreude for example refers to a type of pleasure derived from seeing other people's misfortunes. We can describe the concept in English as I just did, and many of us have felt it when we've laughed at a "Fail Blog" video clip. But there's no single English word to describe it. You can break the word down into a literal translation (Schaden + freude = "damage" "pleasure") but that doesn't tell us much. Then there are wonderfully longer German words like Lieblingsfreizeitbeschäftigung. I'll leave it to the reader to look up the meaning of that one.

In some cases we've taken foreign words and outright made them part of English use. We've done this with French words like déjà vu or gourmet, but we've done it with German too, when we talk about a culture's zeitgeist, referring to somebody really skilled or knowledgeable on a particular topic as that topic's meister, or a person having a doppelganger.

But enough of my introductory spiel. Let's get to the headline topic.

Take a look at this scene from the 1987 horror movie House II. Jesse (left) and Charlie (right) are on a dangerous mission to explore a room in Jesse's house. Charlie arrives to the scene with a machine gun. The following dialogue ensues:

This scene sticks out in my mind as one of the first examples I saw of the following phenomenon:

Somebody says something rather brainy, witty, or sarcastic

The listener is simply too unknowledgeable or dimwitted to pick up on it

In fact the listener is so dumb, he or she ironically concludes that the speaker is stupid

Even if you've never seen this movie yourself, I'm sure you've seen other examples of what I described above.

So is there a word for this phenomenon? Where something smart goes over the heads of stupid people, to the point where it's ironically perceived as being stupid? I don't know of one in English. I figured the Germans might have a word, but I haven't seen one. If there's a word for this in some other language, then I'd love to know about. So far, I haven't heard one.

I ranted about this on Facebook before. A friend of mine, Drew a.k.a. artist Mister 47 of Abaddon Arts, LLC, proposed the following word for it: Brawndoism.

The name is derived from "Brawndo", the fictitious brand name of a sports drink in the movie Idiocracy (2006). For those who aren't familiar with the film, it's about a man named Joe who is put into hibernation as part of a government experiment, only to wake up 500 years later to a world where everybody has an IQ of around 70 or below. This now leaves Joe, who has an IQ of 100, as the world's smartest man. He's asked to solve nation's food crisis and dust bowl problem, and learns that people have been watering crops with a green sports drink called Brawndo. His suggestion is to use water instead. But as you can imagine, he has a difficult time convincing the cabinet members at the White House:

And again, even if you haven't seen either of these movies, chances are you've seen Brawndoism. For example:

Maybe you've seen a friend make a sarcastic joke -- brilliant and even well-executed -- that just went over the heads of people who misread the friend as an idiot.

Then there's the more specific phenomenon known as of Poe's Law, which states that you simply can't do a parody of extremism without SOMEBODY stupidly mistaking it as the real thing, no matter how thick you lay on the sarcasm nor how much you exaggerate. A good example are the people who stumble across satirical Facebook pages such as "Christians for Michelle Bachman" or "Marijuana Makes You Violent", and, despite the over-the-top, blatant sarcasm, still invariably attract one or two people who think the page is serious. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Poe's Law is always Brawndoism, though. Stupidly mistaking a satirist as the real deal is not the same as mistaking a satirist for being stupid.

I've also all too often seen alarmists and conspiracy theorist crackpots who, being too clueless about the topics they're passionate about, try to debate actual experts of the field and call the experts stupid. For example, a layman who concludes that astronomers don't know anything because they "couldn't decide if Pluto was a planet".

Similarly, somebody who calls a mathematician stupid for stating that 1+1 is equal to "10" in binary, because "everybody knows 1+1=2". Speaking as somebody who got his degrees in mathematics, I've run into more than a few incidents like this.

I remember one email correspondence where I used the word "anecdote", and the woman I was writing to called me stupid for having so badly misspelled "antidote".

I'm hoping that "Brawndoism" or a similar term catches on. There's a power in having a word to describe something. Maybe if we have a word for this phenomenon, it will be easier to point it out when it happens. Unfortunately, by the very nature of Brawndoism, people on the "stupid" side probably won't acknowledge it when it happens.

January 16, 2017

I was reading the news about the Ringling Brothers circus closing. It made me think of my very first time I went to the circus. I’ve always had a pretty good long-term memory. One of my many childhood memories is going to the circus with my father when I was about 3 years old. Here's my attempt at remembering every detail I can about that day, almost 40 years ago.

The Skill Of Not Neglecting Neglection

First, to put this event in perspective, it's worth mentioning that I was the first child in my family. When you’re the first child, you’re the center of attention. This doesn’t mean your parents necessarily love you more than your siblings, but it does mean you marked the transition of your parents from “childless couple” to “parents”. My brother was born when I was about 2 and half years old. When that happened, I was suddenly no longer the only child in the house. I was no longer the center of attention. The new baby was.My parents didn’t neglect me, though. Somehow in the middle of work, raising a second child, going to night school for a master’s degree, and playing in a band, my father found time to take me to the circus. So here's as much as I can remember about what was one of my first "father & son" trips.My Circus Story: The Hall

We arrived in a winding hallway. My father pointed to a humanless, automated organ, playing a song as the white and black keys mechanically went up and down. At the time, I took it as a gag to imply there was an invisible man playing. I guess the line between circuses and Halloween wasn’t so fine for me in this new experience. Speaking of which…

We continued walking down the hall, and a clown appeared, looming over me, just a few feet from my face. He smiled and said hi, continuing to stare at me from above, arms out stretched. I just stood there in silence. I was not scared. But it was a lot to take in at once. “Billy, you say ‘hello’?” my dad requested. I just continued to take it in. I looked at the chosen patterns of the clown’s greasepaint. He was certainly a man underneath all of that. I could make out the normal adult that was shielded by the painted mask. He was none the less some stranger I’d never met. Both the clown and my father quickly gave up on trying to make me say hello. Realizing that the situation was uncomfortable (for them, not me), they went their separate ways.The Beasts

I followed my father into another room, lit by a few naked light bulbs. Through the huge crowd of people chatting and shuffling forward in their overcoats, I could make out the bars of a few cages. “Hey Billy!” said my dad, pointing over to one of the cages. “Look out for the bulllll!”, he jokingly sang. The phrase was a jingle from a 1970s TV commercial, and one of many, many catchphrases he’d end up use around the house. I looked over toward the other end of the room to see a behemoth of a bison. It stood still, but with anchored authority. I gasped. It was my first time seeing an animal that large before.I found myself shuffling over with my dad to tall stacks of cardboard trays, each containing dozens of tiny 4 oz. Dixie cups filled with dry animal food. I held my cup. I fed an animal or two. I held my little cup under the mouth of one goat. It didn’t look at me nor the cup. But after its mouth started to eat a few morsels, it then nonchalantly proceeded to pull the entire cup out of my hand. I heard the Dixie cup crush under its teeth as I watched the cup fold into a triangle. “Nooo!” I screamed. I turned around and started walking away, hands in the air. "Ahhh!" It was admittedly a bit of a mock-horror act on my part, as I played along with this strange experience of shock and humor. “Billy, Billy!” my father called behind me. “I got it back! I got it back!” I turned back around. He presented my little food cup back to me, which he had managed to salvage from the goat's mouth. while I had my back turned.

The Ring

I really can’t remember if the petting zoo came before or after the main big top show that day. But I do remember sitting in the dark stands with my father as we watched the main ring far below. I don't remember too many details of the show itself, but I'm sure it was standard circus fare. The only specific parts of the main show itself I really remember were ones where my father leaned over to me and commented. “Ah-HA!”, yelled a magician. “He just said, 'Ah-HA!'", my father commented.

At some point there was a clown with a rubber chicken hanging off of his back. The gag was that he didn't know it was there, but the audience knew. We were instructed to yell, "THERE'S A CHICKEN ON YOUR BACK!" He looked back and forth but pretended he didn't see it. We were instructed to yell it again. "THERE'S A CHICKEN ON YOUR BACK!" He still didn't see it. Seeing that the clown remained oblivious, without any cue, I started to yell the phrase again. My father quickly hushed me, as this wasn't the time to keep yelling. [NOTE: After I wrote this part, I realized there's a slight chance I could be conflating two different childhood memories on this one. I'm pretty sure the chicken-on-your-back thing happened here, not at some clown or magician at a kids party or something, but as with any kind of memory recall like this there's always a chance I'm wrong.]

The lights flickered off and a man in the ring was seen shaking and running around with his arms in the air, painted like a skeleton. “Ooh, a skeleton.” my dad said with a mix of mild surprise, commentary, and intrigue.

At various parts of the performance, the stage lights would turn off as a new act moved to the stage. It was during those brief seconds of darkness that we, the audience, did our part for the show: flashing lights and noise makers. My instrument for this was a little yellow plastic gun. It was shaped like a fat hair dryer with a silver metal squeeze handle, and the circus’s logo in raised lettering on the side. During that time, I was told to fire the gun. Pulling the handle turned some mechanism inside, producing sparks as some internal gear spun and ground itself inside in a whirring rattle noise. They glowed red through the red plastic windows on the side of the gun. Other people in the audience similarly flashed their spark guns or special flashlights during these lights-out moments, effectively becoming part of the show. There was one time when I decided to fire my gun as we were sitting during the lights-on part. My father quickly told me to hold off. I did. [Note: Wondering if my vivid memory of this was still reliable, I searched eBay for '1970s barnum circus sparks gun'. The photo here confirms what I remembered!]I ended up keeping that little sparking gun for a few years. But of course the sparks only had a so much of a shelf life. At some point, squeezing the trigger would no longer produce any sparks. Years later at different circus trip with the whole family, my brother would have one himself, while I held a blue flashlight with a spinning mirror. And some years after that, I remember seeing them both guns in the toy box, one clearly older and more worn out than the other. No doubt the guns wound up with Toys for Tots as the years went on and more toys came in. Regardless, history repeated itself that time all four of us went, as my parents shushed my little brother when he tried to fire his own aforementioned yellow spark gun once during the lights-on part.

Closing

My family ended up doing countless things all together in the years that followed: car races, zoos, theme parks, beach trips, board games, ball games, rock concerts, and so on. But the four of us also did plenty of things one on one. We still understand the value of all getting together, but we also all instinctively know the bonding value of just two family members doing something alone together too. That was something I got from the circus.

March 14, 2016

"Steaks and orgasms: how empty life would be without them." - The Residents, 'Insincere' (2006)

I love mathematics, so I'd love to talk about "Pi Day" (3/14). However, there are already plenty of sites for that. So instead, I'd like to talk about another holiday that also falls on 3/14, namely because it's one month after Valentine's Day. That day is known as "Steak and Blow Job Day". Here's a site claiming to be the "official" one for it. Hopefully the site doesn't crash like it tends to do every year on this day: http://www.steakandbj.org

So where does this idea come from, anyway? Well as I understand it, some radio station years ago decided to promote it as a low-brow humorous reaction to Valentine's Day. More specifically, it's a reaction to the way that Valentine's Day is largely celebrated: a sickeningly-wholesome, commercial, guilt-inducing Hallmark card holiday, centered around pleasing female partners with stereotypically "woman" stuff: flowers, chocolates, overpriced dinners, poetry, and so on. So the idea is that since these sorts of women have hijacked the holiday, then a month later there should be a day to equally celebrate the equally stereotypical man stuff. Personally, I think it's brilliant.

Now every year that I mention this, there are always people who say "But, but, but, it's not just for women!" or "But I buy my husband stuff too for Valentine's Day!" or "Well I'm not one of those shallow women, and in fact I abhor that sort of approach to Valentine's Day as much as you do." That's great! But you're all missing the point. The fact remains that the Valentine's Day phenomenon I described is a very real thing, regardless of whether you yourself participate. So you'd have to be incredibly myopic to not understand why a reactionary, satirical holiday like S&BJ day would come about in the first place.

Likewise, I've seen some men reject the idea by saying "Hey, if you have a woman who loves you and/or have a healthy relationship, then EVERY day is S&BJ day!", or simply "Every day should *BE *S&BJ Day!" Again, these people are missing the point. In fact, let's just take it back to the original premise: you could equally argue that if you have a good relationship in the first place, then you don't need a special day like Valentine's Day for love, since every day should be Valentine's Day. But in that case, then you reject the original B.S. I mentioned which the industry attaches to Valentine's Day, as it doesn't apply to you (again: that's great!), and thus you're really on the side of the people supporting S&BJ Day.

So for the men in relationships, and women who don't try to turn Valentine's Day into a second birthday party for themselves: Happy S&BJ Day!

1) Many people who voted for the winner will now expect everything to be fixed within a few years, and that the new president will do everything he promised to do. It won't, and (s)he won't.

2) Likewise, people who voted for the opposing candidate who said that they'd move to Canada, won't actually end up moving.

3) Despite these people's claims to the contrary, the country won't actually plunge into anarchy, and World War Three won't happen either.

4) There will be lots of photos of these people from the losing party in the press, shown crying and hugging. Somebody might even make a Tumblr account for them.

5) The 2nd Amendment won't be overturned.

6) Roe vs. Wade won't be overturned either.

7) Those "Don't blame me; I voted for [losing candidate]" bumper stickers will come back into popularity.

8) Some actor from Saturday Night Live will regularly impersonate the new president. We'll be subjected to predictable sketches that each run 5-10 minutes long when they should have been 1-2 minutes, as the writers essentially try to make 4-8 years of new jokes with the same underlying punch line. Like the Sarah Palin support sketch, a lot of it will be more mimicking than actual comedy. The character will refine over time, though.

February 16, 2016

Here's part 2, some details on how I fixed up a beat-up book that was falling apart on me. I talk about the whole history behind this book back in part one. Now, on to the fun.

In My Time of Binding

Items used:

9x12" binder, with no push-down opener tabs on the top and bottom ($4.99)

Plastic sheet protector ($1.00)

Binder hole reinforcement stickers, a.k.a. "Doughnuts"

Velcro strips (adhesive sticker back)

Adjustable, industrial-sized 3-ring hole puncher (borrowed)

Individual hole puncher ($1.00)

3-ring binder tab separators

Hey, Hey, What Can I Do?

With the plastic comb binding breaking off, the first solution that came to mind was to just go find a place who could stick on a new comb. I asked Staples, and they said they didn't do it. Then I went to the same Staples the next day, and they said they DO offer that service. Well, OK, then. But if I just put another cheap plastic comb on it, would I just run into the same problem again later? I asked if they had something else they could do, like a strong metal coil binding. No, they didn't. I could have searched around to see if somebody else would, but then thought of alternate solutions.

The Size Remains the Same

Most of the problems I had in this whole project came down to one simple fact: this book is 9" by 12". We live in a world where almost all office supplies are made for 8.5" by 11".

This led to the following problems, which in turn led to a number of purchases and returns along the way:

Most binders, even the large capacity ones, are still only tall enough to cover 11" sheets. This means that if you put a I didn't really see the point in fitting stuff into a binder if I had half an inch of pages sticking out from either end.

Likewise, binders typically have tabs on the top and bottom which you press in order to open the rings, and pull up in order to close the rings. Let's call these "opener tabs" for lack of a better term. When these are closed, they usually stay straight out, parallel with the three rings. This means that even if the front and back covers of the binder were taller, you typically can't fit pages taller than 11" in them anyway, because the top and bottom area are bound by those two tabs.

Even if I wanted to use the plastic combs again, most of these are made for 8.5x11" pages, which means they wouldn't cover everything. The hole system was notably different too; this book used a difference spacing.

Most devices for punching 3-ring binder holes into sheets, are made to only work with 8.5x11" paper. They'll have a non-moveable edge that the top or bottom edge of the paper lines up against for easy aligning. Well, that's convenient if you have paper that's 11" tall, but not for paper that's 12" tall. Otherwise, your 3 holes will be vertically off-center.

In the end, I decided that the plan of attack was to find a 3-ring binder that could easily fit these 9x12" pages without anything hanging out over the edges, then get the holes punched in the right place.

I Can't Cover You Baby

I knew that no matter what, I was going to get some kind of covering for the front or back. I didn't care if this was a simple sheet of plastic to put on top of the front cover and on the back of the back cover. I wanted whatever could help protect the book in the long run as I'd be shoving it in and out of my gig case in the future.

Alas, again, the big problem was finding something that would fit all the pages. Not just holding 300-400 pages, but being tall enough to support 12" tall pages, AND not have those annoying tabs on the top or bottom.

I did see a "legal" binder (8.5" x 14"), but that was too tall. Namely, too tall to be able to still fit the thing in my gig bag of a briefcase. I guess lawyers have longer briefcases for this purpose? Hmm.

In the end, the one that worked was also one of the cheapest binders in the store. For $4.99, I bought what the receipt described as a "PC Kraft Binder". It looked very eco-friendly. I would have preferred something more longer-lasting, like plastic. Regardless, it was tall enough to fit 12" pages, AND didn't have those annoying tabs on the top and bottom of the spine.

Hole Lotta Love

I had a cheap 3-ring binder hole puncher at home, but as you can imagine, it was made for 11" tall paper. I knew that trying to use it to line up 12" would just lead to weird changes in hole placement which would lead to different heights of the paper edges in the binder. Also, I wasn't going to do this only 3 sheets at a time for 350+ pages.

I searched the office for a better hole puncher. No such luck. Though weeks later I did see a plastic comb book binder machine in one room; go figure.

I asked the library. The one they handed me was for 8.5x11" sheets. Damn.

I went back to Staples. They had several heavy-duty, customizable 3-hole punchers for sale. Did I really want to spend $40-$80 on a machine I probably wouldn't be using again anytime soon? At first my brain started to rationalize, "Well maybe this would be a good investment, especially if I plan on printing up books of my own at home to sell, like that one book I was working on, and..." No, no, no. Let's stick to the mission.

I went back to Staples' copy and fax center. They had a few of the 8.5x11" hole punchers around, but several of the bigger ones behind the desk with all of their other stock paper and what not. Surely, they wouldn't let me use one of these when they could instead force me to sell one, right? Well, one way to find out. I had already talked to the clerk about binding books, so maybe if I could give the illusion that I was just going to borrow it for something simple, and then later pay for something else, it would all be acceptable. So I asked if I could use the good hole-puncher. She said yes! I figured out the right setting, using a single page from the book as a test page. Then I punched through all 350+ pages, taking stacks at a time as the machine could handle it. Awesome. Done. "Here's your hole puncher back!"

As mentioned at the top of this post, I did end up buying some more items: reinforcement label ("doughnut" stickers), a little individual hole puncher, a plastic cover sheet, and Velcro.

Stairway to Strengthen

From here, I could have just put the hole-punched pages in the binder and be done with it. But given how many pages there were, I knew that over time the front and back covers would still get knocked around, so I did some additional things:

Use some "doughnut" stickers around the binder holes of some pages. I did this with the first few pages, the last few, and some pages for songs I frequently go to. I didn't want to have to do this with every page, of course. But just the ones that needed the most reinforcement. I also bound one of the test pages I used to get the hole-punching right the first time around, since it had two sets of overlapping holes.I made a point of getting stickers that were clear, not white. That's because in some cases, the holes were on the edges of some of the sheet music, and using an opaque sticker would block a bit of it. We may be talking only 1/8" of it, but blocking it none the less.

Bought a $1 plastic report protector on clearance, and cut it up to make two strips: one to go between the front cover of the binder and the front cover of the book, and another one to go between the back cover of the binder and the back cover of the book. Again, I figured this would prevent wear of the book covers in the long run. This was the only thing I used the little hole puncher for.

Also, while I was at it, I decided to put some black duct tape around the inside of the binder. This wasn't all that indestructable of a binder in the first place, so I figured I'd put tape around where it was likely to get worn in the long run: the place where the cover meets the rings.

"It's been a long time since I Velc and Croed..."

While I was adding the plastic sheets, I had the idea to make these lockable with Velcro. The idea was that these pages of the book would be tightly bound while the book was closed and put away, so no amount of shaking of the bag or tossing the binder around would really jostle the pages around in the binder. You can find strips of Velcro with peel-off sticker backs in stores like WalMart or Home Depot. I like the strips that let you just cut off and use however much you need.

Fool in the Raincoat

Here's one thing I tried, but didn't end up using.

Knowing that the binder was ultimately thick cardboard, I thought I could get something to cover this. I found a rubber textbook cover at Staples. And on clearance! Fits all books 8" and bigger. Well this should work well. Just hook up the corners, and stretch it on. All size fits all, right?

I tried it, and noticed three problems:

The rubber cover just barely fit. It reached the corners, but certainly didn't cover all the edges.

The biggest problem is that it was so tight, it would snap the binder covers backwards. I didn't want to have to deal with my book possibly doing a flying belly flop off of my music stand.

My binder now looked like it was wearing a condom.

So, scratch that idea.

Trampled Under Foot

At some point in the process I had the pages in the binder, and was ready to double check that the binder would actually fit into my gig case. And...it didn't. Damn. The binder was actually thicker than it needed to be for the pages. Fortunately, the cardboardy nature of the binder meant that the problem could be solved by making an additional bend on the side, so that the spine was more curved-shaped than rectangular. If you look at the photo, you'll get an idea of what I mean.

I tried putting the binder in a drawer and bending it on the edge of the drawer. I tried a few other things, but it wouldn't bend in the way that I needed to. Finally, I just put it down and carefully stepped on it. That did the trick. Now there wasn't a huge amount of space between the left edge of the pages and the top left edge of the binder. Now it would fit.

As you can see from the photo, this bend was actually done before I added the duct tape, though I now had a another reason to add the tape.

This book has all of the Led Zeppelin songs arranged by album. So the only other thing remaining was putting in some chapter divider tabs, to separate the different albums. I already had some of these tabs which I had bought last year for something else. Time to put them to use.

And that's about it. That's how I took one of my most often used pieces of stuff, and made it into better stuff. And I managed to avoid spending $80 on a hole puncher.